The Best Way to Teach Weather?
Weather can be a challenging topic for students. It’s not always black and white, there is a lot of gray area. Sometimes weather is caused by multiple things, not just one thing. The best way to teach students about weather is to check it every day!
Each day pull up the weather for students. Either on your favorite weather website or weather channel. We prefer watching the weather on the news so students can hear the meteorologist explain what is happening and why.
Have students track the temperatures, precipitation, cloud coverage, humidity and more! Extend the learning by having students create line graphs and look for trends and patterns.
How much time will this take each day and how much prep is required?
One of my favorite things about this activity is it can be done in less than 5 minutes a day. With just 5 minutes a day over 12 days and students will have spent over 1 hour tracking the weather.
Another reason we love this activity is it requires almost zero prep. All you need is:
✔️ A weather website or local news source
✔️ A simple recording sheet (this can be a plain notebook)
✔️ A few minutes each day
What kinds of questions should I ask my students?
Questions may vary depending on the weather forecast that day but here are some go to questions:
- Does the weather outside match what our weather website says?
- What patterns or trends do you notice?
- What do you think the temperature will be tomorrow?
- Do you think we will have precipitation tomorrow? Why or why not?
- How close was the forecast?
- The forecast predicted rain, but we didn't get any. Does that mean the forecast was useless?
What if there is nothing special about the weather this week?
If not much is going on in the weather, find old videos from your favorite new station. They often leave them up on their website and you can find forecasts that include rain, snow or severe weather.
After a few weeks, students won't just know what temperature, precipitation, wind speed, and humidity mean—they'll have used those terms over and over again to describe the world around them.
This activity came from our 5th Grade Earth Systems Unit. It includes the weather tracking activity and a complete, ready-to-teach unit —so you can spend less time planning and more time teaching!
